The present disclosure relates to the field of medical devices. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to systems and methods for management of medical device alarms.
In a hospital setting, care units use a variety of medical devices to monitor the patient and/or to provide therapy to patients. In the course of operation, these devices generate alarm events which range from routine to critical in the specific severity of each of the events that the alarms are indicating.
Automated alarms can be beneficial to algorithmically determine when an event related to a patient monitoring or patient therapy device has occurred. These algorithms generally compare one or more parameters from the medical device to one or more predefined threshold settings. Alarms algorithms may be threshold comparisons, but may also include logical combinations and using Boolean and/or fuzzy logic. These automated alarms can be beneficial to draw clinician attention to the detection and/or occurrence of an event.
While each alarm indicates a condition or event of some importance or relevance, a significant number of alarms can be generated during routine care and these alarms place a burden both on patients who may be bothered (e.g. woken up) or concerned by alarm events as well as on clinicians who must divert time and attention from other care, tasks, or activities to attend to alarms. A significant number of clinically irrelevant alarms can create alarm fatigue in clinicians whereby the attention to the large volume of alarms can slow recognition or response to alarms indicating less frequent but more importance or critical events.
Therefore, systems and methods that enable the investigation of alarm event causes and management of alarms can help clinicians to investigate, propose and evaluate solutions to, and implement efforts to reduce alarm burden on clinicians.